1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a communication system having a plurality of transmitters sending signals that share frequency and bandwidth over a common channel to a single receiver, and in particular to a receiver that resolves user ambiguity in a received composite signal by using convolutional encoding properties to analyze strings of bit sums and separate out individual user data.
2. Description of Related Art
Communication systems having a plurality of transmitters and a common receiver comprising a multiuser detector are computationally intensive. A means for reducing the number of computations required is necessary for creating an economically variable system for resolving the information transmitted by the multiple users over the same channel. The prior art of multiple access schemes in well known to those skilled in the art. For example, in Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), each user's transmitter has a distinct band of frequency and the users do not overlap in frequency. In Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), every user gets a specific time slot within the same slice of the frequency spectrum. In Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) multiple user signals share the same portion of a frequency spectrum utilizing varying slices of the spectrum at different time intervals. There is an ever increasing need to increase the number of users and data rate transmissions in a reliable, economical manner.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,790,606 issued Aug. 4, 1998 to Paul W. Dent and assigned to Ericsson Inc., of North Carolina discloses a type of modulation using multiple spatially distributed antennas and recombines that data of a receiver for post-processing. A modified Viterbi (maximum likelihood) antenna is used to decode the bits from the multiple users and multiple antennas. The operation of this system is questionable when bit transitions of the various co-channel transmitters are not aligned in time at every antenna (a virtual impossible condition to meet). Also, this system is very complex and can be very large depending on the space required for the multiple antennas.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,917,852 issued Jun. 29, 1999 to Lee A. Butterfield et al. and assigned to L-3 Communications Corporation of New York, N.Y. discloses a method and apparatus of using independently scrambled Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) signals to reduce the multi-user interference between the different radios in the system. However, the scrambling occurs outside the actual error correction encoding process and adds additional complexity to the signal.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,122,269, issued to Wales on Sep. 19, 2000 performs multiuser detection and parameter estimation for a packet radio application. This procedure uses MUD to jointly demodulate packets which have unintentionally collided in time. The procedure uses known symbol sequences to solve for the unknown channel impulse response coefficients, and a correlation process to locate the positions of the known symbol sequences. In the case of short “snapshots” (vectors of received waveform samples), the correlation process will produce noisy data, and inaccurate known symbol sequence position estimates. In addition, the waveforms correlated against do not include the (unknown) channel impulse response, and will therefore also be adversely affected by leaving those out of the correlation equation. In addition, there is no mention of method to determine the number of users which are colliding at any given time, and which users are colliding (as identified by their unique known symbol sequences).